I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Three editions ago, you HAD to have someone be a Cleric* and a Thief because no other class could disarm traps or heal. Two editions ago, you could branch beyond those two classes for those roles using supplemental material (favored soul, scout, etc). One edition ago, you had a dozen leader classes (two in the PHB) and anyone with Thievery as a class skill could disarm traps. The current edition allows for five healers in the PHB and anyone with the proper background or 250 days of training can disarm traps. I consider that a giant win.
Not enough. If part of the game assumes Particular Spell X, and not every class has access to that particular spell, then I am looking at a scenario where not everyone at my table can freely play whatever kind of fantasy hero they want to pretend to be, someone needs to play something that has Particular Spell X, or else I can't use that part of the game.
If that is the case, that is remarkably disappointing to me, given the promises of 5e not requiring any particular "role" to be met in a party.
And the healer roll is a universal element of modern computer/video games. Nearly every party-based RPG allows for it, every MMO has it, and its even found in non-genre like Medics in First-Person shooters. I'll wager most new players know they need someone who can heal (or will learn quickly).
That's some pretty poor apologetics. D&D is a game about pretending to be a fantasy hero, and sometimes you get a table where no one's particularly interested in a fantasy hero whose job it is to support the other fantasy heroes. If 5e's reaction to that is, "Sorry, some things in the game won't work as intended if you do that, someone should play a healer if you want the full experience" (and worse, it never actually comes out and says that), that's a problem.
So yes, I like roles because of niche protection. If any class can heal, pick a lock, swing a sword or cast a spell, why have classes anymore?
Because the job of classes isn't niche protection, it's archetype emulation. A table full of people who all want to be thieves isn't thinking about not being able to scry, heal, or wield heavy weapons, they're thinking about how cool it is to all be from the same thieves' guild. A class is a story, not a mechanic.
Agreed. The medicine skill in 5e is a real shame. I'd like to see it beefed up more. Still, the healer feat and proficiency in herbalist kit does grant some access to non-magical healing. I'd love to see some of the restoration spells become rituals so that ritual caster is an option too.
So you agree that removing things like the golem's max HP reduction should be found in broader abilities than in one particular specific spell? I'm not sure where your point of contention lies, then.
The DMs job to facilitate fair challenge. If your team lacks a healer, the DM needs to step in and "deux-es-machina" a wand, scroll, or potion if he intends to use status-afflicting monsters. Or don't, but then don't whine when your PCs die.
"You can either make the game do what you want it to, or you can have an experience you might not want to have" is not a choice I'm interested in making. I'll just go play a game (or do something else) that already gives me an experience I want to have without me having to force it, thanks. This thing is supposed to be fun, and naked manipulation is always not fun and massive unexpected PC casualties are also not fun.
THIS is the fundamental difference: I don't. I don't give a flying fig if my fire-mage player whines because I threw a fire-elemental at him. Anyone stupid enough to charge a clay golem without a healer deserves a permanent HP reduction. I'm not even a RBDM; but I DO think that not every encounter needs to be winnable based on your HP alone. A PC lacking a specific resource (a healer, a magic sword, a lock-picker, etc) then that group needs to find some way to compensate for it.
Smart play for me is a critical element: If I can win every fight by charging into melee and having more HP than the opponent, the game is going to go to boring mode ASAP.
Why would a game that is supposed to help you pretend to be the fantasy hero in your imagination then turn around and slap you down for having the temerity to imagine "wrong" (by some arbitrary and unstated standard of wrong)? In what way is that kind of naked, aggressive rejection of the kind of character I imagine playing helping me to have fun playing a fantasy hero?
There is a tremendous space between a fire mage who can fireball fire elementals and a fire mage who is still a viable character in a fire-themed adventure because he has something else to contribute, like the ability to talk to, interact with, even command or rebuke the fire elementals instead of fireballing them.
Clay Golems are CR 9. That means, the earliest a group should encounter them is 9th level. Its not like they are goblin-level common nor are they meant for low-level parties. A clay golem might not be guarding a house in Sharn, but I could certainly see one in a forgotten Xen-drik tomb; the inability to heal its damage is probably the REASON it's been able to safely guard that treasure for thousand's of years.
And if you game lacks mid-level clerics, it probably lacks clay golems too (in 3e, you needed to be an 11th level priest to even make one. It was higher in AD&D) so its a self-solving problem!![]()
You just pointed out a context in which you could encounter a clay golem in a world that generally lacks mid-level clerics. So you know this is a thing that could happen. And your solution for such an encounter, by a party who lacks a cleric/druid/healybard is, "point and laugh at the idiots who don't have a dedicated healer!" And you don't see how this isn't satisfying to me?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say (barring optional rules) that What You See is What You Get. We know what spells each class gets. We know what skills and mundane items do. We know what the monster's write-up says. (And its the only Life-drain creature that doesn't restore permanent Hp loss on a long rest that I've seen, meaning I think its intentional). All we haven't seen is magic item use/creation. Make of that what you will.
I'm hypothesizing that consumable magic items are going to be character-creatable, so a party without a dedicated healer class might make up the difference in potions.
Meanwhile, I like this guy. I can't wait to use him now.
My problems aren't with the monster, they're with the apparent niche protection that's going on there. That's ugly, if that's the case.
GX.Sigma said:If your campaign doesn't have magic items, don't use monsters that can only be hurt by magic items. If your campaign doesn't have Clerics, don't hit them with attacks that can only be healed by Clerics. (Or do. That'll teach them to mess with golems.)
As I said upthread: asking GMs to have intensively studied every random monster they stick in the MM for potential areas where their party is uniquely crippled is asking a hell of a lot.
GX.Sigma said:Lots of reasons. The most relevant ones are: because this is a game where there are different classes, and the assumption is that you have a variety of classes, and each class is good at different things, and not every problem is a nail. That's the baseline assumption. The RAW only needs to support the baseline assumption.
Then it's not a game about being a fantasy hero from my imagination, it's about specifically playing some sort of un-stated but assumed group of specific archetypes and SCREW YOU if you can't figure that out for yourself or if no one wants to play one of those archetypes. Guess you can't D&D.
GX.Sigma said:It actually does state this up front. PHB p. 8 (Player Basic p. 5).
That page doesn't imply anything about needing one party member at 9th level to have access to this one specific spell. So I don't think you understood what I was saying there.